I do expect some of the potential readers of this post to live in a very unsafe environment - e.g. parts of current-day Ukraine, or if they live together with someone abusive - where they are actually in constant danger.
I live ~14 kilometers from the front line, in Donetsk. Yeah, it's pretty... stressful.
But I think I'm much more likely to be killed by an unaligned superintelligence than an artillery barrage.
Most people survive urban battles, so I have a good chance.
And in fact, many people worry even less than I do! People get tired of feeling in danger all the time.
...'“Then why are you doing the research?” Bostrom asked.
“I could give you the usual arguments,” Hinton said. “But the truth is that the prospect of discovery is too sweet.” He smiled awkwardly, the word hanging in the air—an echo of Oppenheimer, who famously said of the bomb, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it, and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success.”'
'I asked Hinton if he believed an A.I. could be controlled. “That is like asking if a child can control his parents,” he sa
The level of concern and seriousness I see from ML researchers discussing AGI on any social media platform or in any mainstream venue seems wildly out of step with "half of us think there's a 10+% chance of our work resulting in an existential catastrophe".
In fairness, this is not quite half the researchers. This is half the agreed survey.
I expect that worried researchers are more likely to agree to participate in the survey.
I am not an American (so excuse me for my bad English!), so my opinion about the admissibility of attack on the US data centers is not so important. This is not my country.
But reading about the bombing of Russian data centers as an example was unpleasant. It sounds like a Western bias for me. And not only for me.
If the text is aimed at readers not only from the First World countries, well, perhaps the author...
If diplomacy failed, but yes, sure. I've previously wished out loud for China to sabotage US AI projects in retaliation for chip export controls, in the hopes that if all the countries sabotage all the other countries' AI projects, maybe Earth as a whole can "uncoordinate" to not build AI even if Earth can't coordinate.
I for one am not being hypocritical here. Analogy: Suppose it came to light that the US was working on super-bioweapons with a 100% fatality rate, long incubation period, vaccine-resistant, etc. and that they ignored the combined calls from most of the rest of the world to get them to stop. They say they are doing it safely and that it'll only be used against terrorists (they say they've 'aligned' the virus to only kill terrorists or something like that, but many prominent bio experts say their techniques are far from adequate to ensure this and some say t...
I can provide several links. And you choose those that are suitable. If suitable. The problem is that I retained not the most complete justifications, but the most ... certain and brief. I will try not to repeat those that are already in the answers here.
Jaron Lanier and Neil Gershenfeld
Magnus Vinding and his list
Maybe Abram Demski? But he changed his mind, probably.
Well, Stuart Russell. But this is a book. I can quote.
...I do think that I’m an optimist. I think the
Glad you understood me. Sorry for my english!
Of course, the following examples themselves do not prove the opportunity to solve the entire problem of AGI alignment! But it seems to me that this direction is interesting and strongly underestimated. Well, someone smarter than me can look at this idea and say that it is bullshit, at least.
Partly this is a source of intuition for me, that the creation of aligned superintellect is possible. And maybe not even as hard as it seems.
We have many examples of creatures that follow the goals of someone more stupid. An...
It seems to me that the brains of many animals can be aligned with the goals of someone much more stupid themselves.
People and pets. Parasites and animals. Even ants and fungus.
Perhaps the connection that we would like to have with superintellence, is observed on a much smaller scale.
I guess I missed the term gray goo. I apologize for this and for my bad English.
Is it possible to replace it on the 'using nanotechnologies to attain a decisive strategic advantage'?
I mean the discussion of the prospects for nanotechnologies on SL4 20+ years ago. This is especially:
My current estimate, as of right now, is that humanity has no more than a 30% chance of making it, probably less. The most realistic estimate for a seed AI transcendence is 2020; nanowar, before 2015.
I understand that since then the views of EY have changed in many ways. But I a...
Nanosystems are definitely possible, if you doubt that read Drexler’s Nanosystems and perhaps Engines of Creation and think about physics.
Is there something like the result of a survey of experts about the feasibility of drexlerian nanotechnology? Are there any consensus among specialists about the possibility of a gray goo scenario?
Drexler and Yudkowsky both extremely overestimated the impact of molecular nanotechnology in the past.
not an expert, but I think life is an existence proof for the power of nanotech, even if the specifics of a grey goo scenario seem less than likely possible. Trees turn sunlight and air into wood, ribosomes build peptides and proteins, and while current generation models of protein folding are a ways from having generative capacity, it's unclear how many breakthroughs are between humanity and that general/generative capacity.
Probably that:
When we didn’t have enough information to directly count FLOPs, we looked GPU training time and total number of GPUs used and assumed a utilization efficiency (usually 0.33)
This can be useful:
We trained the league using three main agents (one for each StarCraft race), three main exploiter agents (one for each race), and six league exploiter agents (two for each race). Each agent was trained using 32 third-generation tensor processing units (TPUs) over 44 days
Perhaps my large collection of quotes about the impact of AI on the future of humanity here will be helpful.
Then it is worth considering the majority of experts from the FHI to be extreme optimists, the same 20%? I really tried to find all the publicly available forecasts of experts and those who were confident that AI would lead to the extinction of humanity, there were very few among them. But I have no reason not to believe you or Luke Muehlhauser who introduced AI safety experts as even more confident pessimists: ’Many of them are, roughly speaking, 65%-85% confident that machine superintelligence will lead to human extinction’ . The reason may...
I meant the results of such polls: https://www.thatsmags.com/china/post/15129/happy-planet-index-china-is-72nd-happiest-country-in-the-world. Well, it doesn’t matter.
I think that I could sleep better if everyone recognized the reduction of existential risks in a less free world.
I’m not sure that I can trust news sources that are interested in outlining China.
In any case, this does not seem to stop the Chinese people from feeling happier than the US people.
I cited this date just to contrast with your forecast. My intuition is more likely to point to AI in the 2050-2060 years.
And yes, I expect that in 2050 it will be possible to monitor the behavior of each person in countries 24/7. I can’t say that it makes me happy, but I think that the vast majority will put up with this. I don't believe in a liberal democratic utopia, but the end of the world seems unlikely to me.
Just wondering. Why are some so often convinced that the victory of China in the AGI race will lead to the end of humanity? The Chinese strategy seems to me much more focused on long terms.
The most prominent experts give a 50% chance of AI in 2099 (https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/book-review-architects-of-intelligence). And I can expect that the world in 80 years will be significantly different from the present. Well, you can call this a totalitarian hell, but I think that the probability of an existential disaster in t...
How about paying attention to discontinuous progress in tasks that are related to DL? It is very easy to track with https://paperswithcode.com/sota . And https://sotabench.com/ is showing diminishing returns.
(I apologize in advance for my English). Well, only the fifth column shows an expert’s assessment of the impact of AI on humanity. Therefore, any other percentages can be quickly skipped. It took me a few seconds to examine 1/10 of the table through Ctrl+F, so it would not take long to fully study the table by such a principle. Unfortunately, I can't think of anything better.
It may be useful.
’Actually, the people Tim is talking about here are often more pessimistic about societal outcomes than Tim is suggesting. Many of them are, roughly speaking, 65%-85% confident that machine superintelligence will lead to human extinction, and that it’s only in a small minority of possible worlds that humanity rises to the challenge and gets a machine superintelligence robustly aligned with humane values.’ — Luke Muehlhauser, https://lukemuehlhauser.com/a-reply-to-wait-but-why-on-machine-superintelligence/
’...
I have collected a huge number of quotes from various experts about AGI. About the timing of AGI, about the possibility of a quick takeoff of AGI and its impact on humanity. Perhaps this will be useful to you.
Then AI will have to become really smarter than very large groups of people who will try to control the world. And people by that time will surely be ready more than now. I am sure that the laws of physics allow the quick destruction of humanity, but it seems to me that without a swarm of self-reproducing nanorobots, the probability of our survival after the creation of the first AGI exceeds 50%.
Is AI Foom possible if even the godlike superintelligence cannot create ’gray goo’? Some doubt that nanobots so quickly reproducing are possible. Without this, the ability for AI to quickly take over the world in the coming years will be significantly reduced.
It seems Russell does not agree with what is considered an LW consensus. From ’Architects of Intelligence The truth about AI from the people building it’:
When [the first AGI is created], it’s not going to be a single finishing line that we cross. It’s going to be along several dimensions.
[...]
I do think that I’m an optimist. I think there’s a long way to go. We are just scratching the surface of this control problem, but the first scratching seems to be productive, and so I’m reasonably optimistic...
I have already tried to collect the most complete collection of quotes here. But it is already very outdated.